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U.N. Monitors in Syria Find Grisly Traces of Massacre

The village of Mazraat al-Qubeir in Syria is seen on Friday in a video posted on YouTube by the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria.Credit
UNSMIS, via Youtube

Confronting a scene of congealed blood, scattered body parts, shelled buildings, bullet holes and the smell of burned flesh, United Nations monitors in Syria quietly collected evidence on Friday of a mass atrocity in a desolate hamlet, more than 24 hours after Syrian forces and government supporters blocked their first attempt to visit the site.

The monitoring team’s journey to the hamlet, Qubeir, filmed and posted online, presented the outside world with the first visual proof from a neutral official source that a horrific crime had occurred there.

No corpses were found, and the team’s officials said many of the facts behind the killings, which occurred Wednesday, had yet to be determined. But it seemed clear that the perpetrators had hastily sought to conceal what had happened, reinforcing suspicions that the government, by thwarting the monitors’ efforts to reach the site on Thursday, had bought time for a cover-up.

Activist groups have accused President Bashar al-Assad of orchestrating the killings in a campaign to terrorize opponents in Syria’s 16-month uprising against him, which has grown more violent and sectarian despite numerous diplomatic entreaties and the presence of United Nations monitors since April.

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Kofi Annan met privately with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington on Friday on Syria. Speaking to reporters, he fended off criticism that his peace plan was failing.Credit
Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Mr. Assad’s government, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, has denied responsibility for the killings in Qubeir, where the residents were part of the Sunni majority, and he has called the accusation a propagandist lie. But it remains unclear why the monitors were not permitted to visit the site much sooner.

“Some homes were damaged by rockets from B.M.P.’s, grenades and a range of caliber weapons,” a spokeswoman for the monitors, Sausan Ghosheh, said in an e-mailed description of the visit, using the abbreviation for a Russian-made armored personnel carrier used by the Syrian military. “Inside some of the houses, the walls and floors were splatted with blood. Fire was still burning outside houses, and there was a strong stench of burnt flesh in the air.”

Amid the uproar over the Qubeir killings, the fourth massacre in Syria in two weeks, multiple clashes flared in other Syrian locales on Friday, including Damascus neighborhoods close to the center of the capital.

International efforts to find a way out of the Syrian crisis intensified in Washington, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, an outspoken opponent of President Assad, met privately with Kofi Annan, the special envoy of the United Nations and Arab League. Mr. Annan, whose peace plan that placed the monitors in Syria is widely considered a failure, has insisted the plan can work if the big powers put more pressure on Mr. Assad.

Antigovernment activists who first reported the Qubeir mass killings on Wednesday night, which they blamed on government troops and plainclothes militiamen known as shabiha, said that as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, were slaughtered in the hamlet, a clutch of low-lying farmhouses with a population of 130 amid cornfields about 20 miles from the city of Hama.

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Video from United Nations monitors in Syria touring the village of Qubeir included this image.Credit
Unsmis, via Youtube

But Ms. Ghosheh, the spokeswoman, who accompanied the monitors, said the number and names of the victims had not been confirmed, the community was empty of residents, and “thus the observers were not able to talk to anyone who witnessed Wednesday’s horrific tragedy.”

She said it would take time to sort out conflicting information from residents of neighboring villages. “We need to go back, cross-reference what we have heard and check the names they say were killed, check the names they say are missing,” she said.

The monitoring team’s Qubeir video shows smoke outside homes, a large hole from an artillery shell, interior wreckage and bullet scarring, a bloodstained mattress, a congealed pool of blood and an unidentified man from a neighboring village holding a sheet with the remains of human flesh. Another unidentified man is seen pointing to a framed portrait, then breaking down in tears.

A third man is seen saying in Arabic: “Young children, infants, my brother, his wife and seven children, the eldest only sixth grade, all dead. I will show you the blood. They burned his house.”

A few foreign journalists who were permitted to travel with the monitoring team also reported evidence of multiple killings and signs of attempts to hide the bloodshed. A BBC correspondent, Paul Danahar, said that neighboring villagers who approached the monitors blamed the shabiha for the killings, and that they said the militiamen trucked the bodies away. Another villager said sticks had been used to kill children.

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Credit
The New York Times

“This has basically been a scorched-earth policy by whoever this was; they’ve killed the people, they’ve killed the livestock, they’ve left nothing in the village alive,” Mr. Danahar said in an audio recording posted on the BBC News Web site. He called it “an appalling scene.”

In one house, he said in his reporting, he saw “pieces of people’s brains on the floor.”

“There is a tablecloth covered in blood and flesh,” he continued, “and in the corner, the blood has been pushed into a pile by someone trying to clean it up and, frankly, giving up because there’s simply too much of it.”

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The official Syrian account of what happened in Qubeir was starkly different. A report on the Syrian Arab News Agency Web site quoted witnesses as saying that terrorist groups, the government’s euphemism for the opposition, had attacked Qubeir with rocket launchers and machine guns, nine people had been killed, and the military and law enforcement authorities had been called in to protect the hamlet.

The report criticized unidentified “bloody satellite channels which are counterfeiting the truth to serve their interests,” an apparent reference to CNN, Al Jazeera and others carrying opposition accounts of the killings.

The Friday mayhem elsewhere in Syria included clashes between troops and activists in at least one restive district of Damascus, where explosions could be heard. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British group with a network of informants in Syria, reported clashes in at least three Damascus neighborhoods, while in Homs, a center of antigovernment sentiment, the group reported “the most violent shelling” it had seen since the anti-Assad uprising began.

Video

TimesCast | U.N. Observers Blocked

United Nations observers say that they were prevented from entering the site of another reported massacre in Syria, and that government forces shot at them.

Some experts on Syria have described the Qubeir killings as part of a new stage in the conflict that has crossed dangerously into sectarian hatreds, fomented by Mr. Assad’s government, a situation for which efforts like Mr. Annan’s peace plan are too late.

“We’ve reached the point of no return,” said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and a former United Nations official. “Diplomacy has not kept up with the reality on the ground.”

Mohamed A. Alsiadi, a Syrian émigré who is the coordinator of the Arabic Language and Cultural Studies Program at Fordham University in New York, said that he had never had much faith in Mr. Annan’s peace plan, and that the Qubeir killings proved his skepticism. “Assad is very smart,” Mr. Alsiadi said. “He knows when to put pressure, ease pressure. They’re playing games with us.”

Mr. Annan, who spoke briefly with reporters in Washington before meeting with Mrs. Clinton, has fended off criticism that his plan cannot work and that the Syrian president has never intended to honor it.

“Some say the plan may be dead,” he said. “Is the problem the plan or the problem is implementation? If it’s implementation, how do we get action on that? And if it’s the plan, what other options do we have?”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from London; Neil MacFarquhar from Antakya, Turkey; Artin Afkhami from New York; and Helene Cooper from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 9, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Monitors Find Grisly Proof of a Syria Massacre. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe